


Rebel Rebel

by HenryMercury



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, F/F, First Person Narration, Fugitives, Handcuffs, In which Luci is and always has been alive, On the Run, POV Laura, sex and murder, that one key spoiler from issue 22
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 04:35:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7962679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The handcuffs are a little on the tight side, digging into my wristbones, promising bruises. I don't mind. I don't mind at all. The twinge of pain feeds into the overload of sensation: blunt nails scraping down my lower belly, fingers brushing just right up my inner thigh, and the quickest tongue I've ever known dipping expertly into the cracks in my composure, using them to pry me apart. The cops wish they could break me as quickly as Luci can. The cops want to see me in handcuffs, a plea falling out of my mouth. Too bad I've never found the law to be much of a turn-on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rebel Rebel

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be one in a post-volume-4 follow-up collection to A Two-Piece Puzzle, but it grew to a reasonable length and I decided I liked it on its own. I hope you do too. Cry with me over on [tumblr](http://henrymercury.tumblr.com/) if you like.

The handcuffs are a little on the tight side, digging into my wristbones, promising bruises. I don't mind. I don't mind at all. The twinge of pain feeds into the overload of sensation: blunt nails scraping down my lower belly, fingers brushing just right up my inner thigh, and the quickest tongue I've ever known dipping expertly into the cracks in my composure, using them to pry me apart. The cops wish they could break me as quickly as Luci can. The cops want to see me in handcuffs, a plea falling out of my mouth. Too bad I've never found the law to be much of a turn-on.

I might be getting ahead of myself. Let me set the scene for you just a little—list out the characters like this is the front of a play script. Shakespeare, or whatever. And that other guy, Marlowe. I remember them from high school, even a bit from college before I dropped out.

A is for Ananke. Detective Ananke, past retirement age but too damn stubborn to quit. She treated Luci like her personal project when Luci was in and out of juvy. The way Luci tells it I think there was actually a measure of affection there. Three murder charges and a prison break and that weird bond got all shot through with shoot-to-kill.

B is for Baal, the hot special-agent-of-whatever who shows up sometimes. It's always bad news when he does, but it's pretty well established at this point that I'm into bad news.

B is also for Baphomet, whose less-than-comfortable guest bed Luci's cuffed my hands to the head of. It's hard to figure out exactly what's going on with him and his girlfriend. They're always fighting. They let fugitives hide out in their house. They might be criminals themselves, not that it makes any difference to Luci and me. We're already the worst of the worst. I knew some goth kids in school, but none more goth than Baph and Morrigan. They never, ever open their blinds and half the time they don't bother turning lights on around the place either. They speak like teenagers concocting imitation Shakespeare on the fly.

C is for Cassandra, who stalks us even more effectively that the law does. She's making some kind of documentary—or is 'investigative journalism' more accurate terminology for tracking a couple of killers on the run? Either way, if Cass wasn't such a killjoy I'd say it was pretty cool having media on our tails. That's what fame is.

D is kind of where I'm feeling that this alphabetical thing has run dry. The more I talk about them the less important all these other people feel. They're not here. They're not pressing their fingers into me or biting just right or making breathy little sounds that enter my ears and then ripple through me as lightning.

You won't see the housemates in this scene because they don't come looking for us behind closed doors, and from what I can hear they're neither fighting nor fucking loudly enough to make it into the soundtrack. You won't see Cassandra unless she steps out of the musty little closet in the corner with a camera full of escaped-criminal pornography, and that's so not her style. You won't see Baal because, even if one of his teams raids this place today, he'll wait outside the door until he can hear that we're finished. Baal gets visibly uncomfortable when Luci says anything that could be construed as sexual—in other words, he's uncomfortable all the damn time. And of course, you won't see Ananke because she's feeding worms.

Dead. That does tend to be the end result when you stab a person twenty... uh. You know, the news reports I've heard have given different totals between twenty and twenty-three but I don't personally remember how many times it was that I drove the knife in. Just that it started out with desperation, the need to stop Ananke pulling the trigger and shooting Luci again and doing more harm than just a graze to her cheek. Then it was about stopping her from turning on me, making sure she stayed down. At the end, there was a strange kind of satisfaction to it; to there being no going back. To there being no way to soak my clothes or hair any more completely with blood. To having reached my lifetime cap on consequences to be suffered but not yet on actions.

Should I have mentioned this earlier, before I dragged you into bed with me? I did say a _couple_ of killers.

Until Ananke, Luci always doubted. I could see it in her eyes in certain moments, covered over with conspicuous bravado and innuendo: she couldn't quite figure out why I stayed when she was wanted for three murders and I for nothing. Why I didn't turn myself in and beg a pardon in exchange for helping them catch her. She asked me, once, whether it was that twisted psychopath version of starfucking—the type where people write to serial killers in prison and end up marrying them. I tried to tell her that if that were the case I'd pick someone whose crimes weren't two trumped up acts of self-defence and a frame job. I'd pick someone I didn't consider innocent.

Luci was a star before she killed anyone or broke out of prison, of course, though maybe nobody but me remembers this anymore. She was a musician. When I saw her in Brixton, she flooded all the hot air in that theatre with deafening, vibrating magic. Often I'm not even sure Luci herself remembers how good she was, but I do. She sings under her breath sometimes, absentmindedly, but always stops when she realises what she's doing.

It was Luci the rockstar that lured me in, but it's not her I stay for. It's not Luci the killer I stay for either. It's just Luci.

Since I killed Ananke I haven't seen Luci doubt that I'll be staying with her. I don't think she's really a murderer—but there's no disputing that I am. _She_ should leave _me_ behind, though I'm sure she hasn't even considered it—working with the cops and going back to jail for her part is too great a swallowing of pride to be anything but anathema to her.

"What are you thinking about?" she asks me, words murmured into my skin by hot, damp lips. The pleasure recedes and I regret whatever I've done to make her stop to ask.

"You," I reply.

She rolls her eyes, but says, "Good. I would hope so, when I'm right here eating you out."

"Actually you're not, right now."

"Smartass. I should leave you here to think about your actions for a while."

She's leaning back, like she's going to climb off the bed and let me lie here handcuffed to watch the daylight at the edges of the thick curtains fade away.

"Please, Luci. Stay. Keep going."

" _Only_ because you've asked so nicely," she grins in a way that makes it clear she was never going to stop herself halfway through something enjoyable just to censure me.

I know, and she knows, that there's no such thing as _only_ anymore. There's everything or there's nothing. There's so much it overwhelms us or so little we starve, with nothing in between. Burnt summer or barren winter. When you're on the run, I've discovered, it's not just about your steps; the ground is moving underneath you at the same time. It shouldn't work this way, but surrounded by instability Luci's own instability seems to cancel it out. Two wrongs. The earth quakes, but when her hands are on me I quake right along with it until I forget what standing still ever felt like and why anyone would want to do it.


End file.
